A scanner to count calories still on your plate

By Staff, Relaxnews

Friday, November 8, 2013

While there are a slew of fitness trackers available to tabulate your caloric burn, dieters are still stuck logging in every bite they take to calculate the calories they’re consuming. But now a new device could change that.

TellSpec, currently raising a heap of money on its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, is a nifty gadget that connects to your smartphone and gives you calorie counts, allergy info, and details about food, just by scanning it — and we don’t mean barcodes.

Wave the device over your food (be it an apple or a plate of pasta) and TellSpec’s raman spectrometer — which essentially use lasers to evaluate an object’s chemical composition — uses an alogorithm to calculate not only calories but ingredients and whether or not the food contains gluten, trans fats, or pesticides, even in trace amounts. All the data is then sent to an app on your phone so you can check the details before you tuck in.

TellSpec is offering early backers the device and two years of unlimited food scan analysis for $150.

Another cheaper (but presumably less accurate option) is the app Meal Snap, priced at $2.99. Photos uploaded to the app’s database are automatically identified and assigned a rough calorie count, which is then sent back to the user within minutes.